Cronulla Riot Anniversary Exposes Peak White Entitlement in Modern Australia

"I still have never been to Cronulla beach. Even today it evokes a spectre of fear."

Twenty summers ago, the pretty beachside suburb of Cronulla, home to more good surfers than anywhere in Australia except maybe Snapper Rocks, as well as several impossible-to-believe-are-real supermodels, went to hell after middle eastern out-of-towners beat up some local lifeguards.

Text messages punched out on Nokia phones swirled calling for retaliation against any Lebanese who dared visit this hard-core surf town right there on Sydney’s southern rim

The subsequent Cronulla riot was the culmination of several years of tension between the predominantly white, Anglo-Australian population of Cronulla and the Lebanese community out west.

December 11, 2005, was a wild ol day, anyone with a less than northern European hue was targeted, and the repercussions were felt for weeks.

Even Bondi Beach, a forty-five-minute-drive north had boom gates set up to stop mischief makers and a little bit south of Bondi in Maroubra, one Bra Boy attempted to take on half of Beirut in a melee that is still talked about in reverent tones.

Cronulla’s Connor O’Leary, who surfed for Japan in the Olympics ’cause he got a Japanese mama, says he was forced to hide his heritage on that fateful Cronulla Riot day lest racist wolves tear him apart.

“I went for a look at the riots that day, which wasn’t the smartest thing, and Mum was really worried about me,” O’Leary told The Sydney Morning Herald. “It sticks with you, I was only 12, but it was a crazy time down there. Everyone was very cautious and it was dangerous, no doubt.

Twenty years on, how’s everybody feeling?

Well, in the Guardian today, the Walkley-award winning journalist Sarah Malik paints a damning picture of modern Australia.

Read ’em and weep:

The fall-out 20 years after Cronulla Riot

Twenty years on, I still have never been to Cronulla beach. Even today it evokes a spectre of fear.

My position in “white” areas and industries continues to be contested by racism, creating an anxiety I still feel like a drum in my chest. The long walks and swims suggested by my therapist to recover and relax are often marked by traumatic incidents.

Recently, at a golf course, four middle-aged white men demanded my sister and I freeze so they could putt. One of them yelled “currymuncher” and “cunt” when we refused to, threatening to hit us with a golf ball. I felt my heart race. But the model minority in me who usually defers and de-escalates went mute: for the first time in my life, I yelled back. I swore. I told him the path we were on was for walkers, and they should stop, not us. They looked shocked when my Aussie-accented voice barked back at them. I was shocked, too – and surprised at the audacity of my anger, usually internalised, desiccated into depression and curdling into bitterness. The poison exited my system. I felt clean, energised by adrenaline, secretly elated at how bad and mad I was – it was – and how good it felt to fight back.

White entitlement and racism are such a part of our cultural waters that refusal and confidence in public life by non-white sport stars, politicians and media figures still feels transgressive. I am shedding the grateful immigrant posture as a survival mechanism, the preening towards whiteness and power, the buying-in to the myths of the colonists who settled here just over 200 years ago who tell me they “own” this place and set the terms of my conditional belonging.

It is a myth I am increasingly resisting. It’s reframing Sydney’s “white” areas in my mind as stolen black land upon which I am also a settler. It’s recognising the spiritual power I feel in the water and this stupendously beautiful land as the magic of Country. It’s re-orienting my deference towards this continent’s Blak custodians, the true owners of this land, its waterways, songs, stories and histories for millennia. And when I will visit Cronulla beach for the first time, it will be Dharawal land I’ll be paying my respects to.

Dang!

If you want a few laughs watch the movie!